ZHYZ UAV

Tornado Leopard

The designer of ZHYZ UAV Tornado Leopard (Xuan-Feng Bao, 旋风豹) is the high school senior Mr. Liang Ming-Xuan (梁明轩), whose father was a team member of Chinese national team of model airplanes, and after his retirement of national team, he became a coach for Zhuhai team. Mr. Liang Ming-Xuan was heavily influenced by his father and had a keen interest in model airplane design and competition. The idea of this ZHYZ experimental UAV is rooted in the Mr. Liang Min-Xuan’s attempt to combine the advantage of helicopter and fixed-wing airplane. In October 2012, the design was submitted to the Innovation Cup All China UAV Design Competition and subsequently won first place. The VTOL UAV is produced by the school-owned factory, but the initial production was met with failure: Due to the high speed of the UAV in level flight, the precision requirement is high, so it was decided to utilize laser cutting processing. However, when the ordinary material commonly used by model airplanes was cut by laser, it disintegrated. As a result, a much more expensive high density foam material had to be used to solve the problem. Propulsion was another issue in that not only the school owned factory could not produce it, there was not any available on the market either, so it had to be custom built. The resulting VTOL UAV Tornado Leopard cost more than ¥ 20000, much more expensive than model airplanes. Tornado Leopard is a tail-sitter with winglets. Payload is mounted in the nose of the fuselage and propulsion is provided by a ducted fan mounted at the rearend of the empennage, and the ducted fan is actually a pair of coaxial rotors. The VTOL UAV takes-off and lands like a coaxial helicopter, and once airborne, Tornado Leopard would transition itself to level flight, where the coaxial rotors would act as contra-rotating propellers to provide thrust as a pusher engine. The complete name of Tornado Leopard VTOL UAV is Tornado Leopard Coaxial Rotors UAV (Xuan-Feng Bao Gong-Zhou Shuang-Jiang Wu-Ren-Ji, 旋风豹共轴双桨无人机)